University of Massachusetts Medical School Chancellor Michael F. Collins sounded the alarm yesterday on potentially devastating changes coming to the health care system.

“I am not speaking of rising health costs and the reforms that are coming,” Dr. Collins told an audience at the Central Mass Business Expo Luncheon at the DCU Center today. “That is certainly an important topic, but one that is also widely discussed. Instead, I would like to talk about an aspect of health care that has gotten much less attention, but is just as important, if not more so.”

Dr. Collins was referring to what he called the “politics of how we fund the basic biomedical research that helps fuel our economy and leads to countless life-saving advances.”

He said disagreement over how to reduce the national deficit has left the health care system in a precarious position, and he warned that if nothing is done by Congress before January 2013, dramatic across-the-board federal spending cuts of $1.2 trillion, including $600 billion from defense and $600 billion from domestic spending, would automatically go into effect.

“The purpose of the sequestration deadline was clearly to force Congress to take action to address long-term deficit reduction, but unfortunately it has not had that effect,” he said. “Our nation needs a comprehensive and balanced deficit reduction package, but such a package must be sensible.”

Regardless of the effectiveness of investments in various programs, major cuts would be imposed, he said.

For example, federal investment in science would be reduced by 8.2 percent, representing a $2.5 billion decrease for the National Institutes of Health, he said.

Dr. Collins said the approach to cutting the deficit seems almost nonsensical. “After all, you do not reduce your spending equally on food, entertainment and prescriptions when you put your family on a tighter budget,” he said. “Rather, you make carefully weighed decisions about each type of expense.”

He said the potential cuts threaten Worcester's “burgeoning” life sciences cluster, and the entire Central Massachusetts region will also be affected, as will research hubs all around the nation. “Those across-the-board cuts will slash programs that are the very engines of our innovation economy and the critical starting points for new cures,” said Dr. Collins, a College of the Holy Cross graduate, who at the medical school, oversees a workforce of more than 6,000. The school generates about $1 billion in revenue and more than $250 million in research awards annually.

He said investing in innovation creates the jobs of the future. “That is why so many other nations are increasing their research and development support, aiming to catch up with us or even surpass us,” he said. “Should we make it easier for them to do so?”

More than 485,000 current jobs nationwide are directly supported by the NIH, over 40,000 of those in Massachusetts, including in Worcester at UMMS, he said.

According to the latest rankings, UMMS was 43rd out of all 2,617 organizations in terms of NIH funding, and fourth out of 180 Massachusetts organizations and 32nd out of 133 medical schools.

“The tremendous growth in our research enterprise has had a truly transformative effect on our campus,” he said “I know that many of you here have deep roots in Worcester. I urge you to think back to the windswept pasture that lay near the bank of Lake Quinsigamond in the 1960s.”

In just the last decade, he said, the school has added three state-of-the-art facilities, the most recent being the 512,000-square-foot Albert Sherman Center.

Dr. Collins said life sciences is currently one of the most robust economic sectors in the entire nation.

He called on the nation to support more investment in biomedical research, and to make investment in science and NIH funding a national priority.

The NIH-funding process also helps ensure that basic research provides one of the best returns on investment we can make with our hard-earned tax dollars, Dr. Collins said. For example, for every $1 the federal government invested in it, the Human Genome Project has generated $141 in economic returns. That single project has created $796 billion in economic output and 3.8 million job years worth of employment, he said.

As biomedical research thrives, also lifted are transportation, retail, service and other industries throughout the surrounding community and across the nation, he said.

Advances in biomedical research through NIH funding that have occurred during our lifetime, he said, include a decline from four out of five children with leukemia dying to four out of five surviving today; a 50 percent decline in deaths from heart disease over the past 30 years, and a 60 percent decrease in deaths from stroke; vaccines for pneumonia and meningitis — diseases that once killed up to 1 million children worldwide every year.

And UMass Medical School stands ready to contribute to the next wave of breakthroughs, he said, through its work on topics that range from better ways of managing obesity to three-dimensional studies of human DNA.

Those include:

— Robert Brown, who has identified possible key new drug targets for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a fatal neurological condition also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease.

— Dean Terry Flotte, who is leading cutting-edge work in gene therapy, while Neil Aronin is trying to use RNA interference, Craig Mello made a Nobel Prize-winning discovery, to treat Huntington's disease, another fatal neurological condition.

— Michael Green, who is unraveling the mystery of how cancers spread, and Craig Ceol using tiny fish to develop a new means of earlier diagnosis for a deadly skin cancer.

“Such advances represent not just treatments for as-yet untreatable diseases,” he said.

“They are completely new approaches that could lead to whole new categories of diagnostics and medications — and they are just the start.”

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